Entrepreunerial Innovation and Actionable Foresight

4 posts from October 2013

October 31, 2013

You know those stories people tell, those who were there in the beginning of something that became a revolutionary change in the world. They love to look back and tell about the struggles of the early days, how it almost didn't happen. Then there are those people who were on the fence, but later secretly wished they had joined.

Those changes rarely happened overnight. They usually take years, sometimes decades. Apple Design, Burning Man, how many startups with 3 or 7 or 14 employees that went on to become household names. You know these stories. The Media loves to write about these people years after their hard work and make it seem like it happened overnight.

I know The Future of Money TV Series will shift our culture and understanding around money. I've put in almost 4 years of my life researching the changes - most of this unpaid - driven by my passion and fascination of what is emerging. I put everything in my life on hold (my Master's degree, my personal life, even my relationship at the time which crumbled under the pressure) when I went to work for Innotribe, the innovation division of Swift, as an attempt to directly make change in the industry.

Now, I am taking the story to the public. That's what the Future of Money TV Series is all about. A positive vision of the future - but not just the philosophy and economics - the practical ways you can act every day to create the world you want to live in - through each transaction.

I am driven and this is going to happen one way or another. I am tenacious and do not give up. I am ambitious and I can't help but think big. I want to make this series. I want to share this information with the world so we are informed and empowered to act in a way that creates the world you want to live in.

This is going to happen. The only question I have for you is: Will you be there?

The Alternative Currency Consortium: An entity modeled after the W3C to facilitate interoperability between currencies and set/create/manage standards. I modeled the meetings of the ACC after the Internet Identity Workshop.[Side note: I went to work for Swift with the intention of doing standards work... but that didn't materialize...]

The Mobile Wallet: You'll notice a Smart Check and Mobile wallet in Dinner with Friends. While the UI for these devices appears on screen for mere seconds, I created detailed UX workflows for these two future artifacts.

Novenify: Novenify was a life extension company founded in 2016. But the most interesting aspect of this scenario is the corporate currency, the NEUX, that the founder created when she founded the company. An aspect of this currency appears in Dinner with Friends in the form of the Blue Orbit credits (corporate currency that the waiter is collecting to earn a suborbit space flight).

I conceived of the Neux three years ago. While launching the Kickstarter, I was not content to merely experiment with what exists today, but with what I believe will be possible in the future.

Payment

Novenify has a innovative payment philosophy. While we accept standard currency for our Analysis and Pro-Active Extension Program, our other programs accept payment only in Neux dollars.

About Neux

Neux dollars are our own currency, developed and created by our Founder, Ms Hill. Ms Hill crowd-sourced the funding for her ground-breaking research, with all early investors having the option to receive their investment returns in our currency. At that time, Novenify was the only company who accepted this payment. In the past decade, Neux dollars have been approved for transactional currency status by the Alternative Currency Consortium. Neux dollars have subsequently gone into regular circulation.

Neux dollars can be currently be earned by highly conscious and humanity contributing individuals. Please contact us to apply. (source)

I saw this experiment for real when I met the Amsterdam Artist, Dadara, in March of this year. He showed me his Love Currency. This was more than just a voucher... it was a currency with a non-financial value encoded into it. Much like I had envisioned with Janet Hill's Neux currency.

When I went to create the Kickstarter, I decided to make NEUX for real and encode certain values in it.

I'd like to introduce you to the NEUX.

The values encoded in NEUX are not financial. It is a belief in a positive, inclusive, systematic view of the financial system that abundantly offers/creates the ability for currency to circulate in the market system, for the co-existence of diverse, complimentary and even adversarial currencies, products, systems and infrastructures to co-exist.

You can get your own NEUX by financially backing the Kickstarter. You're exchanging a financial value into a non-financial valued currency. The ratio is 1 to 1 at the $100 level. Want some NEUX? Choose from one of these two levels with a bonus round:

$5 for NEUX: I'll randomly send you some NEUX. I can't tell you how much that would be. The future is uncertain and so it the amount of NEUX at this level. ;)

$100 for 100: You'll receive 100 NEUX (along with the other rewards at the $100 level)

NEUX BONUS: At $500, you'll get your name (or may remain anonymous) on the backside of the currency.

What may become of NEUX currency? I have some ideas I will share in time. Like in the Novenify scenario, there may be a time when NEUX currency is the only form of payment for certain products, services or information.

This is an experiment in layers. Like my films show layers of the future.

October 18, 2013

It's been a wild ride, this Kickstarter experiment for the Future of Money TV Series. Yesterday marked the beginnig of our two week count down. Two weeks to raise the remaining amount or ....

I have been joined by 137 amazing people. People including Bank Executives, Burning Man founders, Bitcoin enthusiasts, Community Currency Creators, Bank Startup Founders, Futurists, Startup Veterans, Science Fiction Authors, Scientists, Marketers, Journalists, long time friends, brand new ones and many people I haven't met… yet!

I'm amazed to bring this diverse group of people together who believe in a positive vision of the future of money. I know this series will transform lives, will transform minds, will transform the world.

Fast or slow, this is going to happen. You can be here at the beginning. Any amount helps! Join us!

October 13, 2013

I'm catching up on my Science reading this morning, reading a beautiful article about Predators in Urban areas. It's a review of research and stories of large predators living in urban areas and expanding their natural ranges - Coyotes, Cougars, Wolves, Bears in the Western States.

This is a trend I am happy to see play out and I had a gut intuition of it several years when I started seeing Coyotes at midnight on my Hollywood streets. A few years ago, I heard coyotes howling in Griffith Park, once I saw a pack of 5 juvenile coyotes in broad daylight!! More recently, there's a cougar living in the Hollywood Hills.

Much of this article reviews methods to deal with wild animal population and ranchers/livestock. It's a typical systems perspective. I was especially interested to read how a rise in cougar related complaints occurred after a rise in hunting cougars (net death increase). This is a typical output of a problem we try to solve in a system we do not understand. What happened was the deaths were of mature/adult cougars which increased the adolescent male cougar population to fill their places. These adolescent male cougars were more likely to kill livestock and female cougar's kittens (to replace w/ their own offspring) which caused the females to move into areas they did not usually populate.

We wouldn't know the systems view without this experience. I think we can have more foresight and understanding from a systems perspective - which will help us stabilize systems like this more effectively and sustainably. To do this, one must not take one perspective as the "correct" one. It is dangerous to make decisions from one view in a system - this often has drastic unintended consequences.

This is why it is important to understand and take into consideration all perspectives at the table - even if one disagrees and judges one view to be "wrong."

This kind of thinking is something I have trained myself in for 3+ years. It has exponentially expanded my ability to hold space for possibilities in my mind. The methods I use are Spiral Dynamics (as a development level thinking) and Systems Thinking (Draper Kauffman was my amazing systems teacher). This view has also evolved from my own personal ideology - a taoist view shifting from one polar view along the spectrum to another. As much as I can, I hold the space to believe "there is no wrong perspective."

This is where I am coming from when I say things like, The Future of Money is abundant for bankers and others with the explicit goal of making money and/or having power and equally as well as people striving for a more sustainable, triple bottom line life experience. Neither of these worldviews are wrong. They co-exist. While it may be the goal of one worldview to eradicate or convert another worldview, that is not at all what I am trying to do.

My goal is to create/assist in creating/improve the abundance for groups/individuals/communities - regardless of their measurement stick (getting out of poverty, entrepreneurship, gaining power and wealth, living sustainably and in harmony).

And this is what I will show in The Future of Money TV Series. How, regardless of what you use to measure success, you will find more of it in the future. But don't expect the world to stay the same. There's no reason to be afraid, it's changing in amazing and wonderful ways.